Chapter Fifteen: Wounds

I was so weak after I was wounded. But not only physically. I was weak to begin with in heart and spirit that could not resist the call of the Ring. It tricked me so many times into thinking it was my own will that wanted to put it on and so I did many a time or was sorely tempted to at the least, and each time I did, it ended in disaster and only later did I realize how I had been fooled. The memory of its previous attempts did not remind me that it was filled with nothing but deceit and would bring me to a place where I could not escape, not even through death. What terrible cold stole through me, the pain that I can feel even now. Nothing could keep it away for long, though the athelas tried and you, my Sam, have tried so very hard to keep the dark from consuming me. It is not your fault that you couldn’t. I have begged the Powers with many tears that you do not blame yourself, that you don’t think that if only you had loved me or helped me more then I wouldn’t have to leave. I wish I could tell you that no one could love me more, that you have helped me in so many ways, that I could never have lasted this long if you hadn’t been there. But I cannot tell you. You would know then that I am leaving and I wish to leave that, the worst blow I have given you among so many, to the very end. I am a coward, Sam. I can’t tell you, my dearest friend, brother, my own heart and soul, what I am planning, what I must do. Instead, I grieve within myself as I did the day after I was stabbed and for so very many, many days afterwards, for all the trouble I had caused, for what the Ring was doing to me inside, revealing that I was the weak person I always knew myself to be. Would I be maimed for life? The answer came slowly. Yes. But most of all, I grieved and still do, that you three were more burdened than ever since I now had to ride Bill and you four now had to carry most of what he had and I was and am incapable of being anything but a worry for you all.

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I thank the Powers every day for Strider being there when we most needed him, that he was able to drive away the Riders, that he was able to help you with the athelas and that he was there to guide us along our way. He did not hide anything from us about how gravely you were wounded, but he wouldn’t let us give up hope either, though I was near in tears over fear of what would happen to you. We hardly slept at all that night, trying to keep you warm and your wound clean. We didn’t understand all that Strider did when he returned the next morning, why or what he sang over that terrible blade or what he saying to you, but when he bathed your shoulder with the water he had put the athelas in, we all felt better, even you.

We would have died without him and you would have been worse than dead. There were so many times I dreamed of that, then I would wake and you would either be sleeping beside me or when we got home, I would stand at the threshold of your bedroom and watch your sleep. You were there, real and alive and even with the pain that still strained your features, you were beautiful. I could go back to sleep then, knowing that you were there, that you would always be there. I have stood some nights at your room even now and though you will never occupy it again, I see you sometimes in my heart’s eye and you are still resting, still so beautiful. I don’t quite understand it. It’s your bed and it’s not that I see. Perhaps it’s the one you have now. But there you are, plain as plain, as fragile and luminous as the moonlight that streams in your window.

I was so afraid how empty this place would be without you, how different, but you are still here, my dear love, and you are also where you need to be. That gives me a peace I didn’t think I could feel so soon, but I do feel it when I see you this way, and I can rest again myself, knowing that you are.